at the velocity of emotion

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Fabulous Falbalas

Thanks to the De Young’s fabulous Free Fridays, I got to see Falbalas (1945), the film I didn’t know I needed to see until I was mesmerized by a loop at the Gaultier show, a designer I never knew I needed to love.

What hooked me on Gaultier was his depth of understanding of his role as couturier, a depth witnessed by that loop of film and reiterated in those uncanny talking-head mannequins. I blogged about it here.

In a way, it all goes back to Pygmalion, although Americans only know that myth through My Fair Lady, which is so anglicized as to eradicate its psychoerotic significance.

Pygmalion was a sculptor who prayed to the gods to make his statue of a woman live. For statue, read dress, and you have the meaning of Falbalas — except it’s a tragedy, he doesn’t get the girl, because she’s not the docile creature of myth, but a young French woman of spirit. Not the perky spirit of Julie Andrews, but the self-possessed, volatile, vulgar, vulnerable fighting spirit of Micheline Presle.

Micheline Presle, who plays the dress who gets away, gives the kind of performance — well, there were a few American film actresses in the 1940s — Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Crawford — who could approach that level of emotional nudity, communicate a range of the heart’s emotions without words — or should I say, were encouraged to do so by the patriarchal studio system. Today, I’m not sure an American audience would recognize emotions — or, rather than blame the victims, I should say, the powers of Hollywood have banished those emotions from the screen, what used to be called “woman’s films” being beneath their economic contempt. Macho twerps.

The other reference for Falbalas is The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette (1678), a masterpiece recently ridiculed by French President Sarkozy as unworthy of study. Fascist ass. The Princess of Cleves is a psychological study updated by Henry James in Washington Square, and again by director Jacques Becker in Falbalas, in which a man’s shallowness of spirit leads him into the trap of his own contempt for love.

There’s a lot to say about Falbalas… I’m still waiting to hear from fabulous French-tilted cult video house Le Video when they’ll have it stock.

Meanwhile, here’s a rundown for you French speakers from a French person: